Talks - Caution and Commitment to One Path

Caution and Commitment to One Path

Caution and Commitment to One Path

Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
, 1999-04-20

Today Gurudeva talks about the dangers of rushing into meditation as the result of reading a few New Age books, how without the guidance of a trained teacher, memories and emotions can spring from the subconscious mind and consume the would-be meditator. It is necessary to go slowly on the path, and proceed on the basis of sincere commitment to a one religious tradition.

Unedited Transcript:

Today at Kauai Aadheenam. April 20th. Greetings, everyone in cyberspace! It is nice to be with you today and we are wondering how you are.

A question came in about New Age books that are out there, saying jump right in to this meditation and chant, without any warnings of what could happen.

Every new thing should be approached slowly. There is an old saying, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." That means, when you rush in to something just because someone wants to sell a book, be careful. Because in meditation and in chanting, you stimulate the inner mind and what is in the inner mind, emotion and memory is locked in, they come up and consume you. That is, if you have had a divorce or many, or an abusive relationship with your family or abusive relationships with a spouse, they have been packed away in memory patterns and emotion has been attached to those memory patterns. As soon as you start to meditate, you open up that subconscious mind and relive those experiences. This has happened to many people and they have given up meditation and they have given up chanting. But, they haven't given up reading New Age books and other books, too investigating all the paths, picking up a little bit here and a little bit there but not going too deeply because they don't want to open the doors to that big, old subconscious mind with all those ugly and hurtful memory patterns.

Therefore, caution on the spiritual path is good. Any mature guide on the spiritual path will admonish to go slowly and don't try to get to the end of the path before one begins at the beginning of the path.

The beginning of the path is sincere commitment. One big problem about the New Age is, they are absolutely committed to not being committed at all. There are many paths up the mountain. But, the New Age path as it is today, is a path around the mountain, looking at all the paths that are going up the mountain, trying a little bit here and a little bit there, running up one path and down, walking around the mountain and running up another and down, walking around the mountain ... and on and on and on. Sincere commitment toward one path is a lifetime commitment and then follow that path over the rocks and the boulders, getting wet by the waterfalls on that mountain, until you get to the top.

I hope this answers this question. Now, we are going to move into our other languages, beautiful Tamil language, French language and Malay.

Aum Namah Sivaya.

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Devotees seek a satguru who teaches them to understand suffering, and brings them into the intentional hardships of sadhana and tapas leading to liberation from the cycles of experience in the realm of duality.